I don't think everyone is required to win a Nobel Prize to effectively criticize Bush' economic policies. Krugman being decorated with one is just an affirmation of the lame duck Presidential leadership we have had for the last eight years. After all, W's historical low approval rating by the people sheds a spotlight on his performance.

Here is a guy who turns his life around in his forties by being 'religilious' who was otherwise given to constant heavy drinking. Prior to that his own father, Bush Sr, had concluded that his elder son would amount to nothing. But there is this indomitable thing called 'destiny' that had designs on him to be elected the Emperor of the World. Harvard Business School did he attend but the other week I read about a French journalist who got accepted, to his own amazement, at the prestigious institution. He acknowledged that once you're in, there is no way you can't walk-out with a degree. Needless to say, he could not get a job with that degree but he went on to write a book about his experience at HBS and musings that followed.

During the housing bubble, Bush was preaching how America was evolving into an 'Ownership Society' as home-ownership rose to historic high of almost seventy percent. Now with the sub-prime mortgage mess and looming recession, the ownership rate might go even below historical average percentage of the mid-sixties since so many mortgage-holders were unscrupulously coaxed into the sub-prime party.

When irrational exuberance takes over during boom times on the part of the actors, there is only so much the system can suck all up, then a recession crawls in. Robert Schiller, Yale economist and even Greenspan had been hinting of bubbles for quite a while. Partly it was the fault of Greenspan as the low-rate interest was offered to prop up the economy for way too long thus paving the way sub-prime mortage abyss.

BTW, if the seniors are the big-time swingers, the only root-cause of that phenonmenon could be the jagged little pill called viagra.